


Love Lost and Love Found Again

by Shatterpath



Category: Bionic Woman (2007)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Light Angst, love lost love found again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-16
Updated: 2010-09-16
Packaged: 2020-04-12 06:12:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19126222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatterpath/pseuds/Shatterpath
Summary: For my Sappho fragment challenge of:I simply want to be dead.Weeping, she left me.This will also double as my Schmoop Bingo prompt of 'Long Lost Love'.





	Love Lost and Love Found Again

**Author's Note:**

> Written in about an hour and a half on the dreary morning of 9-16-10. I had been agonizing over this prompt for weeks and it finally clicked. This is the idea that I had been contemplating the entire time, I just had no idea if I could pull it off. Thank you Ruth and Jamie!

We all knew that she has always been living on borrowed time. Ever since Will cheated death with his magician's bag of tricks, that shadowy, sickle-bearing figure has hovered almost visible at the corner of everyone's eye. 

Poor Jamie. Run down like a helpless animal by the maddened creature we ourselves had created, her will bent to a discordant tune only she can hear. Poor Sarah and her madness we all silently wonder if we helped create. 

It had taken Jamie some time to fall into the life she could not avoid, no matter how she wanted the normalcy lost in that crash. There was no avoiding the thirty million dollars of experimental hardware that powered her now, leaving her as much machine as woman. I've always wondered the effect all that machinery has on the real bond of body and soul. Can one be more machine than human? It certainly seems that way in Sarah at least. But not Jamie. Through all the temper and discordant adaption to this new life, she remains essentially true to herself. 

No surprise that even my formidable emotional defenses are chipped away by the fascinating puzzle that is Jamie Sommers. Not just chipped away, but eventually felled as surely as time wears down the very mountainous bones of the earth.

It is the single most exhilarating and terrifying thing I have experienced. More than combat or the twisted halls of madness of the insane, for those things I understand. 

But the woman who slowly takes over my heart is forever an enigma. She is fiery and fractious and sweet and loving. She is ordinary and can smash walls down with a single kick. She loves to dance and eat ice cream and torment the younger sister she is trying so hard to parent. She mourns the unborn child replaced with the bionics; she sexes me up like a porn star. She's a whirlwind of energy and deadly danger that I feel no fear of, even if I can never forget it.

Frankly, I've always just been along for the ride.

Jonas has never approved the way things worked out with Jamie and I. Believe me, I'm in full agreement, but the girl is a force of nature that cannot be tamed, only negotiated with. Somehow it's worked for so long time that the end is like tripping down the stairs, leaving a body winded and wounded.

Four years, three months and twelve days. 

Four years, three months and twelve days since her broken body was brought back to life with the bionics. 

Will had estimated a lifespan of only five years.

Five years for the machinery, so tiny and sophisticated it seems even now more fiction than science, to begin to fail.

Somehow I know it's coming and I'm helpless to stop it, for love cannot halt the decay of the bionics, the toll it takes on Jamie. I see the wounded animal in her eyes as the animal part of her understands what is happening. And like an animal, she cannot bear to slowly die, but simply fades away. 

In a glance over a crowded field of death far from home, she tells me everything, the love and pain we have shared searing my soul. Smoke wisps over the carnage and the calls of the dying. Tears course down the cheeks I have kissed, to drip down the body I have loved that holds the soul I adore. Blue, blue eyes so bright they seem unnatural hold my soul for an endless moment, the film reel of life held in cosmic fingers, halted for those moments of farewell.

Then, in a stumbling burst of speed only she is capable of, my heart and soul is gone and I am once more alone.

One doesn't know alone until one has loved and lost. It had always been a dry fact of academia, the pain of love lost. Oh sure, I could quote decades of expert learning about the human psyche, but the agony of it is paralyzing. 

Jonas rants and sends out search parties, but Jamie has ceased to exist. The very thing he wants back is the very thing that prevents him from doing just that. Some perverse sense of amusement filters faintly through the numbness over that fact. 

Days pass before Jae comes to me to sympathize with my pain and in his eyes and gentle voice, the loss of Sarah still burns hot and sharp. Somehow, that makes it almost bearable and we are the only solace the other has, our shared pain a very real bond.

An eternity passes, every piece of paper, every patient, every familiar hallway of Burkett a sharp reminder of her. I survive and even manage to fool everyone around me that nothing more serious than the loss of a project happened, only professional rage fueling me on.

Years pass as I must continue on alone, grow another heart in place of the one lost. The world around me has changed. When I can do something ordinary, something I would have shared with her, I find a real appreciation for it. A walk among the autumn trees, the wind off of the ocean and I can almost feel her close.

It feels right to make friends with Becca, to share her pain of first losing her mother and then her sister. Somehow the teen understands that there is plenty that I don't tell her, can't tell her, but I share everything that I had with Jamie in our strange and wonderful relationship. It makes the girl smile sadly and hold my hand and again, I find a friend in the pain left behind by Jamie's loss.

I never consider her dead, strangely. Things were so weird with poor Jamie anyway that death seems too ordinary, too simple. Did she just stop functioning one day? A piece of stratospherically expensive electronics broken with no one to fix it? All of the new electronic toys in their near-microscopic sizes is faintly amusing and painful to me, reminding me of the tiny components that made up for the limps and senses lost to Jamie. At least she had some more time, right?

Sure, Ruth, just keep telling yourself that.

Somehow I am looking at my fiftieth birthday, stunned that the date has snuck up on me. Has it really been this long? Jonas tosses me out for a long weekend, Jae drags me out for drinks and Becca helps me sop up the liquor with a decadent chocolate cake.

In the mirror, I examine myself critically, bemused at how little I've changed since I lost my love. Oh sure, my hazel eyes have never seemed as bright, the more extreme shades of their changing colors lost to heartbreak, but that hardly seems important. The body that houses me still remains sturdy and slender and surprisingly strong. Jae and I keep each other in shape, sparring endlessly to the shared heartbeat of friendship in mutual loss. The periodic jogs with Becca are fun and keep me in touch with the young woman I have grown to love over time.

"Ruth."

Shocked at the whisper of my name, I cannot deny the rush of fear and adrenaline that blasts through me. Whirling, I am confronted by a ghost and the rest of the world falls away. 

An apparition, she stands there in the doorway of my bedroom, hands deep in the pockets of her leather jacket, face pensive and drawn.

"It took longer than I thought it would," the ghost says quietly, "to wait to die but instead be rescued from that fate yet again. I couldn't come back until I knew that that specter was gone from my life."

It has been four years and three months and twelve days since she disappeared from my life and took my heart with her. It has nearly been that long since I gave up hoping and left my love for dead. Trembling, I reach out, shocked that she's corporeal, the cool of the leather jacket barely masking the heat of her body beneath.

"I'm so sorry, Ruth," Jamie husks, her voice harsh as though she has not spoken since I heard her voice last. "I'm so sorry that I hurt you and left you behind."

The touch of her fingers to mine breaks something cold and hard inside of me, like sunshine melting ice. Soundless, not capable of words just yet, I can only step in close and hesitatingly, desperately hold her body close, feel her breath against my ear. 

Time and loss fall away as once more I feel the warmth of love.

"Oh Jamie…"

And in our combined warmth, I am saved and made whole once more.


End file.
